It’s conference season and I’m doing the rounds of crime and literary conventions. One aspect of crime writing conferences is that I get to meet, or at least to listen to, detectives and forensic investigators who have worked on actual cases. Although fascinating, there is a gruesome reality about them which can be hard to swallow.

In Edinburgh I was staying close to a pub called The World’s End, indeed walked past it a dozen times although never went in for a drink. In 1977 it was the setting for the ‘World’s End Murders’; the double killing didn’t actually take place at the pub, but that’s where two 17-year old girls were last seen alive. Their horrible deaths were not fully solved until 34 years later when forensic science had advanced sufficiently to pin the crime on two men (the instigator was already in prison for another sex killing and his wastrel sidekick was long dead). What made this case especially chilling was that I was 17 years old in 1977. The hairstyles and fashion of those two girls looked like those of my school friends when we made our first underage forays into the adult world on those Friday nights 40 years ago.

Walking past that pub and recalling that story made me reflect on the crime writer’s craft. We write about subjects too awful to contemplate in daily life, but people buy our books by the million. Crime fiction is rarely out of the Sunday Times top-ten list and usually steals several slots. So how can I write about painful death and wasted lives? My guilt falls away when I consider that the same is true of authors writing war stories, horror stories, spy thrillers, grim historical epics, apocalyptic novels and sword-swinging fantasy. None of these worlds are places we would want to find ourselves. Perhaps the only story we’d truly be comfortable inside is a light romance; preferably set somewhere warm and exotic, with a pleasing amount of cuddly sex and a whiff of adventure but no risk of actual harm.

We don’t want to inhabit those plots created by crime writers, but guided by the author we can dare to edge into them just for a while.